The Sun, the Sand...and a Thief

Now that spring is here, maybe you’re making plans for an early beach vacation. If so, you may find relevant something that happened to my family last fall.

Our beach house was burglarized.

In fact, a number of vacationers at Outer Banks beaches were burglarized in their fancy rental homes last year. Barb and I and our party of relatives who have long been assembling in that area of the North Carolina coast fell victim around Thanksgiving.

On previous trips, we’ve always felt safe. We generally choose a huge home — one we couldn’t begin to afford in the summer but with an attractive rate off-season. We then round up 20 or 30 relatives and friends who want to go along and share costs.  Because the couple of door keys in our rental packet were never enough to go around, we often left doors unlocked.

Last year’s house – a beautiful 14-bedroom oceanfront – was in Kill Devil Hills. Guests from New Jersey, South Carolina, Hampton, Charlottesville, Winchester, Cismont and Richmond came and went all week, some familiar faces and others strangers to most of the group. It was a great time.


The Hit
Then, on Friday night, with about a dozen people in the house, it happened.  A young man entered through an unlocked oceanfront door, went past the closed door of the theater room, where a number of us were watching a DVD of “The Wire,” past rooms where one guest was playing her violin and another was reading a book, and started searching guest rooms for cash.

He made one good hit, finding $250 in a pants pocket in our son’s room (Kyle had been laid off from his job the previous week), before prowling on down the hall. A few minutes later, as Kyle and another guest (a retired law enforcement officer) stepped out to chat at the elevator, the thief changed direction and hurried down the hall toward them. He wore a hooded sweat shirt with a wool scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face, as though coming in or going out on what was actually a rather cold night.

With so many people moving about all week, they assumed this chap was just another new face. They even said hello to him (a memory that probably made our law enforcement officer feel a bit sheepish later). The uninvited guest mumbled a reply.

But when he darted into Kyle’s room, they knew something was up. When they got down the hall, the sliding outside door was open, and the thief had disappeared.


The Aftermath
We learned from the police that we were the 60th burglary victims on the Outer Banks since June. In each case, someone entered a home from the beach side — probably watching through all those undraped oceanfront windows until everyone seemed to have left for dinner — and walked through rooms, taking all the cash left around. 

I wish we had been told of this when we checked in. Only after I got home and went online to the Outer Banks Message Board did I find a discussion of the burglaries, which Assistant Chief Dana Harris of the Kill Devil Hills Police Department says have been “basically an ongoing problem.” 

When we questioned people in the rental office at checkout about being left in the dark, they said they included a sheet in guest packets saying basically, “Lock your doors.”  But our packet had no such notice, and even if it had, that random statement would not have had half the impact of specific information that this quiet beach community was averaging 10 break-ins a month.

Harris said earlier this year that a young man in his late teens or early 20s had been caught and was believed to be the perpetrator in all of the burglaries. “Any burglary since he was arrested,” said the assistant chief, “has had a different M.O.”

Let’s hope that arrest is the end of it, but if not, at least now you’ve been alerted. The Outer Banks is a wonderful place and a long-standing tradition for my family. Barb and I will continue to go there, but I do believe we’ll be starting a new tradition henceforth: From now on, we’ll be locking our doors.
 

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Randy Fitzgerald is chair of the English and Mass Communications Department at Virginia Union University. He was a longtime public relations director at the University of Richmond and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Richmond, Virginia.